Traveller_Levin's Blog

Love in the Tall Grass

by Claire Keegan

Cordelia wakes on a frosty afternoon, watches turf smoke drifting past her bedroom window. She rises, opens the window, and hears the swoon of matinee music in the road. Winter air teems in, on this, the last day of the twentieth century. Cordelia strips naked, pours water from the steel jug, half fills the basin, wrings out the washcloth, and soaps her hands, her face. When the pipes burst in November, she didn’t bother with a plumber, broke the ice in the rain barrel and dipped the bucket down. This water’s cold. She dries herself and dresses, slowly, in a green dress, fastens the chain of a platinum locket around her neck. She bends and laces up her black shoes, knowing that when this day is over, nothing will ever be the same.

In the kitchen she lowers a bantam’s egg into a sauce-pan, puts the kettle on, takes out the stainless-steel eggcup, its tarnished spoon, the stripy mug and plate, and waits until it’s ready. Somewhere somebody is chopping wood. This kettle always sings before it boils. She undoes the bolt and sits beside the shell, salts the egg, spreads butter over bread, pours tea. The wind blows withered leaves across the linoleum. The Burmese believe that wind carrying betel leaves into the bride’s house will bring bad luck and unhappiness to be married couple. So many useless facts rattle like old currency inside Cordelia’s head. The clock on the mantel ticks happily. Not long now, it seems to say. Not long now. When she’s finished, she turns the eggshell upside down, a trick she played in childhood that turned to habit. She takes a handkerchief from her sleeve and wipes her mouth. It is time. She undoes her braid and brushes out her hair. She know no other woman whose hair’s turned white at forty. Finally, she takes her good black coat fromits crook and goes out into what’s left of December. 

It’s been nine years since Cordelia walked this road, a steep road leading to the ocean. Not much has changed. The national school’s been painted, but the Silver Dollar Take-Away is still there and the ice-cream van with its sign well faded, but there’s a light at the Lone Star Guest house and the little souvenir shop’s door is open. She suspects that after the new century’s ushered in, they’ll close again, wait for summer’s tourists and the trampoline kids. She becomes aware of faces behind net curtains. A boy free-wheels past her on his bike. She stops at the chapel, slides back the glass door, blesses herself at the front. The porch smells of wet marble, old stone, damp coats. She used to imagine standing here in a wedding dress with her father giving her away.

Inside, the chapel’s empty; the marble railing she remembered, gone. Two statues guard the altar: the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph. One in brown, the other blue. Why is Mary always blue? She wonders. She lights a candle at her feet, she looks so lonely. Near the altar stands a coffin covered in purple cloth, such a small coffin, nut then she realizes it’s the organ. She backs down into the empty confession box, slides the grid across.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” she whispers.

That takes her back. A sudden draft travels through the chapel, sounding strangely like a motor race, a high reviving wind. She sits in the bottom pew and opens the missal at random, reads the lesson from Palm Sunday and thinks Judas Iscariot a beautiful name.

Gorse shelters this road, green, shuddering gorse that bursts into relentless yellow for half the year. It is already getting dark; she feels the light draining, watches the blue dusk setting in the west. She stops and empties a pebble from her shoe. Clouds gather over the barren dunes. She feels her heart beating, feels tired, bone tired, and evening deepens all around her so very quickly. Why does time go fast, the slow? She has to walk two miles or more. She remembers the waiting room, the gleam of the stethoscope, the promise, and hurries on.

So too was it dusk when Cordelia met the doctor, a late September of fallen fruit. Exasperated, she’d taken a hammer and nailed a sign, APPLES, to the front gate. A gale had come during the night and shaken the tress bare. She’d woken and found the orchard grounds carpeted with apples: Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, Bramley, Red Janets, crab apples. She filled buckets, basins, the old Moses basket, but the surplus lay abundant and bruised in the long grass.

When the doctor’s car turned into her driveway, Cordelia was sitting on the steps outside her front door, turning the “Jam & Jellies” pages of her cookbook. On the window ledge above her head stood jam jars of drowned wasps, fooled by the spoonful of jam at the bottom of the water. The doctor threw a tall and steady shadow over her. He looked like a man who could jump a fence and climb a tree, like a man who used to run. She led him up the orchard path, where he took his hands out of his pockets and shook his head.

“Such waste,” he said. “There’s nothing I hate more than waste. Do you have a spade?”

He took his jacket off and rolled up his sleeves. His arms were pale fro summer, the veins in his wrists like blue branches a child might draw on a white page. But his hands were tanned, as though he had dipped them in permanent ink that wouldn’t wash off. The autumn sun burned orange while the doctor dug a pit. They lined the clay with straw and carefully laid the apples down so they could not touch.

“There,” he said, “apples year-round.”

“Come in and wash your hands.”

Her kitchen was dark and cool and smelled of soot and something else the doctor could not name. Cordelia gave him washing-up liquid, and he stood at the sink scrubbing his hands. She filled a cup with milk, which he drank before he left with a shallow basin full of apples. Cordelia gathered her skirt into a pouch and filled that too. The doctor noticed her knees, marked where she had knelt on the grass, her brown thighs, and thought of them as he drove back home to his wife and children. Every time he turned a bend, the apples rolled around, noisy on the backseat.

The doctor came back. He returned the basin, refilled it at Cordelia’s insistence, and returned again. It became habitual, on Thursdays, for the doctor to stop.

“I thought apples were supposed to keep the doctor away,” she said.

“Doctors differ.”

“And patients?”

“Patients are all the same. Patients just want to feel better.”

When the weather was dry, Cordelia and the doctor drank tea outdoors. They sat in the dappled shade beneath the trees, talking. Cordelia asked him about medical school, about being an only child. Neither one of them had a sibling or a living parent. Cordelia was a good listener, and the doctor liked to talk. He talked about his childhood, how he used to stand for hours in the porch killing flies, how his father took more photos of his show daogs than of him, how his aunt was in the convent and his parents had hopes of him joining the priesthood. But he never once mentioned his wife; he was like a book whose middle chapters were missing. Cordelia sensed neglect. Up close, she smelled mothballs in his wintr jacket, reminding her of a drawer that hadn’t been opened in a very long time.

On her thirtieth birthday, Cordelia sat with her feet in a basin of hot water and listened to the thunderstorm. It was late November. She drank three big vodkas and tied a ribbon in her hair. Lighting flashed across the room. When the doctor arrived, she took his hand and led him out to the orchard. She lay down on the wet grass.

“I’m thirty,” she said.

“You’ll catch cold.”

“I don’t care.”

“Are you drunk?”

“Does it matter?” she said, and unbuttoned her dress.

They lost track of time. When the doctor looked at the time, he had put the face of his watch up close to his, then rushed off, leaving skid marks in the avenue.

The next morning Cordelia lay in bed while drowsy bluebottles struggled against the windowpanes. She watched the sudden, fast shadows of swallows who flew past her window in fleeting pairs subtracting light from her room and marveled how living things could suspend themselves in midair. She imagined the last of the over-ripe fruit, the latecomers, falling in the slightest breeze. She did not have the heart to pluck them. She imagined the stem weakening, the fruit clinging to its cource, losing, loosening, then letting go, falling.

The doctor told his wife he was out on house calls. Because his car was so conspicuous, they started to meet on the sand dunes at Strandhill. They brought drumsticks, a flask of whiskey, cake, and bars of Belgian chocolate because the doctor had a sweet tooth. On dry days, he opened his shirt and she kicked her boots off and let her hair down. But mostly they just lay there with Cordelia’s big black coat over them, listening to the tide, he with his head in the reeds. Sometimes they fell into shallow sleep, but always Cordelia was aware of the irreversible ticking of the doctor’s gold watch: tick, tick, tick. Not long now, it seemed to say. Not long now. She hated that watch; she wanted to stand up and throw it in the ocean.

Cordelia dreamt she was in a room with a green, flapping curtain. She could see out, but nobody could see in. When she told the doctor of this, he started talking about his wife. Cordelia didn’t want to know about his wife. She wanted him to bang on her door in the middle of the night with his fist, to come in with a suitcase and call her by her name and say, “I’ve come to live with you at my own peril.” She wanted him to carry her into a strange house and leave the door wide open. The doctor said his wife went to bed early. He said on fine nights he sat out on the stoop behind his house and smoked a cigarette. From there he could see the headland farther up, where the road curved into the lights of her village.

Winter came with sudden, unpredictable showers. Cordelia met him in pubs, where they ate red meat and wine. It was dark by four o’clock, and the doctor talked about getting married, how he’d felt that it was something he had to do, so he married the first woman who would have him, at twenty-two. He had no sense of himself. His wife gave up her job and got pregnant. She couldn’t sew. If a button went missing from his shirt, she threw it out. Cordelia didn’t ask why he didn’t sew on his own buttons.

They got away for a weekend in Dublin. She met him in the local town, and he told her to lie down in the backseat of the car until they got away on the main road. When they reached the hotel, his solicitor was standing at the reception desk. The doctor introduced Cordelia as his colleague. He stank of guilt. They made love with the window open, listening to the Liffey flowing down Eden Quay. It felt good to be surrounded by strangers. The doctor went to his meetings in the afternoons, found quiet restaurants at night. He was careful with his money, talked about the price of sterling, how his wife bought a coat for ￡300 without consulting him. Once Cordelia came out of the bathroom and found him looking through her handbag.

“Any aspirin?” he asked. “I’ve a headache.”

On Christmas week, he came to her house with steaks and served them up half raw with a bottle of brandy.

“Happy Christmas,” he said and gave her a box of dark chocolates. She was allergic to chocolate.

She didn’t see him for two weeks afterwards. He called her from the phone box at two A.M.

“Where were you when I was twenty?” he said. His speech was slurred. “My wife wants to know why I don’t touch her. It’s like touching a snake. She’s going home to Kilkenny for the weekend. She’s taking the kids. Where do you want to go?”

“Spain.”

“Right! Ha! Ha! Spain it is!”

That weekend he took Cordelia to a town in Limerick whose only industry was its abattoir. There was a rancid smell in that town, and they got a room in a hotel whose hot taps never got hotter than lukewarm. A tinker’s wedding reception was in full swing downstairs. Cordelia got drunk. She walked down the corridor in her nightdress. The wool carpet under her feet depicted huge red roses. She stood at the window looking at the married couple going away in a buggy drawn by donkeys. People threw flowers and beer cans at the limousine.

“Til death does us part,” the doctor said. “It’s always married people who cry at weddings. They know the difference between the vows and the life.”

They gave each other things. That was their first mistake. He took a pair of surgical scissors from his pocket and snipped off a lock of Cordelia’s hair. He kept this between the pages of a book named Doctor Zhivago. Another time, having lain out in the dunes past dark, they accidentally wore each other’s scarves home. He gave her old books whose pages were edged in gold. And Cordelia wrote long letters on white pages saying days without him were like months without a sunrise, without oxygen.

In the middle of the night, while his wife and children slept, the doctor climbed high up above the drawing room, pushed the attic door open, and placed the things Cordelia had given him under the insulation. He knew they would be safe there, for his wife was afraid of heights.

But the doctor never wrote a line to Cordelia. When he went away to Lisbon on vacation with his wife, Cordelia received no word from him, not even a postcard. The only specimen of his handwriting she’d ever witnessed was when he gave her painkillers for an earache. Across the label in an almost illegible hand was written: “One to be taken with water (or vodka) three times daily.”

Cordelia is almost there. She passes concrete railings at the car park, climbs the steep incline through the dunes, under the shadow of the mountain. She stands to get her breath back, watches the toss and turn of the blue-bellied tide breaking into perpetual, salty lather on the strand. Reeds bend low to let the wind pass. There’s little to show human presence here; the wind has rubbed all footprints from the sand. Just a broken plastic spoon, a buckled beer can, a child’s beaded purse. Cordelia stops and stoops to pick it up, but it’s empty, its lining torn.

Lights from the town throw an orange sash across the east. She hears music, tinkers playing Jim Reeves records on the halting site, the systematic purr of a generator. A piebald mare whinnes and canters down along the ocean’s edge as if she too has dreamt of a man holding a gun to her head. Clouds accumulate, thicken in the darkness. Cordelia finds the mossy patch on the hill where they first lay down. That was almost tenyears ago. She lies in the reeds, pulls her collar up, and waits.

The doctor walked into his drawing room one afternoon, and there on the floor was the piece of black ribbon he’d taken from Cordelia’s hair to bundle up her letters, each one addressed to his surgery and marked “strictly confidential.” When he raised his head, he saw his wife’s legs dangling over the edge of the ceiling.

“Whose hair is this? Who sent these letters? Who have you been seeing? Who owns this ribbon? Who? I want to know; speak to me. Who is Cordelia? Cordelia who?”

His wife read aloud. She began to cry. There were words like “forever,” “always,” and “til death does us part.” It was late afternoon when she began. The doctor sat in the armchair by the fire and through the window watched the shuddering chrysanthemums pressing their rust-colored blooms against the panes. His wife dropped each page to the living room floor as she read. These pages floated, and by the time she’d finished, she had asked for a flashlight to read by. At the end of many pages was written, in a generous hand, the name Cordelia. The doctor’s wife would not come down but sat there, insisting on the truth.

“Are you in love with her?”

“In love?” asked the doctor in an astonished voice.

“She’s obviously in love with you.”

“It’s infatuation, nothing more.”

“You think I’m dull as ditch water. You’ll leave me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re my wife.”

He lured her down. A splendid fire throve in the hearth. For the doctor, out of nerves, had thrown shovefuls of coal onto the flames. Before dawn, in the presence of her husband, she slowly burned Cordelia’s letters. The doctor watched the fire devouring the pages, Cordelia’s lock of milky hair singeing in the blue heat. He thought about the burns he’d treated, the very worst cases, and yet it took all his strength not to put his hands into the flames to retrieve them.

“She’s blond,” said the doctor’s wife.

Two days later the doctor called Cordelia into his surgery and in a low, sensitive voice, informed her that their affair was over. He joined his hands and pushed his thumbs around in small, anticlockwise circles. This must be what it’s like to be informed of a terminal illness, she thought. He talked and talked, but at some point Cordelia stopped listening. She was reading the eye-test chart behind his head. She couldn’t read the small print at the bottom. Naybe she needed glasses.

The doctor put his head in his hands.

“Oh Cordelia,” he said, “I can’t leave her. You know I can’t. Think of the children. Think of them asking, ‘Where’s Daddy?’”

“Where’s Daddy?” For a reason unknown to her, she felt like laughing.

“Wait for me,” he said. “In ten years’ time the children will be grown and gone. Meet me on New Year’s Eve at the turn of the century. Meet me then, and I will come home and live with you,” he said. “I promise! You’ll haunt me ‘til then.”

Cordelia laughed, and that was the last she saw of him. She passed patients in the waiting room. The snivelly middle-aged woman with the tissues, the pale man with his bandaged arm, the wounded? Was everybody waiting for this man?

Gradually, the bad dream faded. The green curtain and the window furled backwards into memory, but the promise stoked like a hot poker in Cordelia’s head. Cordelia coveted her solitude. She started rading late into the night, playing her piano, practicing uncomplicated airs. She talked to herself, speaking freely in the empty rooms. She didn’t make any sense. Slowly she became a recluse. She covered the TV with a tablecloth and put a vase of flowers there; she threw the transistor radio with all its bad news away. She made lists, pais her bills through the mail. She got the phone in, realized the turf man, the grocer, the gas man, anyone she wanted, would call around and deliver. They left cardboard boxes full of groceries, gas cylinders, and bags of turf outside the door, took the checks from under the stone. She rose late, drank strong tea, made a ritual of cleaning out the grates. She grew thin and stopped attending mass. Neighbors knocked on her door and peered in through the windows, but she did not answer. A powder of rust-colored ash fell over the house, accumulated on every horizontal surface. It seemed that every time she moved, dust rose.

Evenings, she lit the fire, watched the whoosh of flame around the turf, and listened to the rhododendron hedge, the Virginia creeper scratching the windowpanes. Cordelia imagined someone out there in the dark, rubbing a peephole in the dirty glass to see in, but she knew it was only the hedge. She had always kept the garden, stayed out in summer with the clippers, trimmed it all back and raked the laurel leaves off the sandy path, mowed the grass, lit small, inoffensive fires whose smoke poured down beyond the clothesline.

Now the neglected hedge began to intrude upon the house, grew so thick and close that it kept all the downstairs rooms in constant shadow, and when the sun was going down, strange, monkey-puzzle shadows poured into the sitting room. Cordelia could sit under the reading lamp in the middle of the day and pretend it was night. Time didn’t seem to matter. Years passed. Sometimes, when the weather was warm and the rhododendron buds opened, she walked naked around the house, brushing against the damp blooms. Nobody ever saw her.

It is night now at Strandhill. The half moon seems to throw more light than it should. Cordelia can discern the outline of the cliffs against the sky. The ocean is as it always was; the childish notion occurs to her that the waves say he loves me, he loves me not. It is a terrible thing to be a fool at forty. She has been alone too long. Nothing and everything has changed. Cordelia feels she has run a very long race, and now her heartbeat may slow down to normal. One way or the other, this is the end. She puts her hand to her face, takes comfort in the warmth of her breath. She feels the wind getting colder, pulls her coat around her, fastens her buttons. It won’t be long now. She closes her eyes, remembers the snip of his scissors cutting her hair, hot, broken sleep, a green bruise fading on her neck, lying down on the back seat of his car, the eye chart in the surgery.

A small parade marches across the hill, holding torches, gearing up for midnight. It is the brass, trumpet music of people celebrating the passage of time. A boy in costume beats a drum. They march in their own time. Girls in mini-skirts are twirling batons, making for the lights of town.

“Cordelia.” A woman stands over her. “You don’t know me. You knew my husband; he was the doctor,” she said.

Was the doctor? Was?

“The doctor won’t be coming.”

Cordelia is startled. It is a long time since she has spoken to another human. She doesn’t know what to say.

“You didn’t think I knew?”

The doctor’s wife is a lithe, small woman with a lot of white in her eyes. She pulls the belt of her coat tight around her waist as if to make it smaller.

“It was obvious. When your husband comes home from house calls with sand in his shoes, his shirt buttons done up wrong, hair brushed, smelling of mints, and a gigantic appetite, you don’t have to be a genius to figure out what’s going on.” She takes out cigarettes and offers one to Cordelia. Cordelia shakes her head, watches the face in the flame of the lighter. It is the face of a woman who was once good looking, but there’s desperation there now.

“You write beautiful letters. I have never in my life received a letter such as yours.” The drum is beating faintly now on the headland. “You know the funniest thing? The funniest thing is, I used to pray he’d leave me. I used to get down on my knees and say the rosary so he’d leave me. He kept your letters and things in the attic; I used to hear him up there at night, getting the ladder. He must have thought I was deaf. Anyway, I was sure he’d leave me when I discovered them. He loved you as much as he is capable of love. It’s no consolation, but I’m sure of that.”

“Loved?”

“I didn’t have the heart to leave him, nor he, me. We were cowards.” Her voice is breaking. She looks out toward the ocean and composes herself. “Look at your hair. Your hair’s white. What age are you?”

“Just forty.”

The doctor’s wife shakes her head, reached out, touches Cordelia’s hair.

“I feel like I’m a hundred.”

“I know.”

The doctor’s wife lies down in the reeds and smokes. Cordelia feels no ill will toward this woman, none of the biting envy she imagined.

“How did you know I’d be here?”

“He has a terrible memory, writes everything down. And he believes his handwriting is illegible. You’re penciled in ‘C. Strandhill at midnight.’”

“Strandhill at midnight.”

“Not very romantic, is it? You’d think he’d remember.”

The tinkers’ fire in the car park is sending out the smell of burning rubber when the doctor runs up the dunes.

“I took a wild guess,” says the doctor’s wife.

He stands there, looking ten years older and out of breath. In the moonlight, his suit is shiny. He is alive, and it is almost midnight. Cordelia is pleased, but nothing is as she imagined. The doctor does not reach out for her. He does not lie down in the tall grass and put his head in the crook of her arm, as he used. He stands there as if he has arrived too late at the scene of an accident, knowing he might have done something if only he had come earlier. Behind their backs the perpetual noise of the ocean folds in on itself. Together they listen to the tide, the contradictory waves, counting down what time remains. Because they don’t know what to say or do, they do and say nothing. All three of them just sit there, waiting: Cordelia, the doctor, and his wife, all three mortals waiting, waiting for somebody to leave.